The cover article of The Times Magazine on Sunday reported on whales and the possibility of interspecies communication between them and humans. The final two paragraphs of the article described an occasion in 2005 when a humpback whale became entangled in crab-trap ropes and was freed by a rescue team. Some of the language in the retelling of that event was identical to descriptions of the rescue in an e-mail message that circulated widely after the incident. Specifically, the lines that the whale swam “in joyous circles” after it was freed and “nudged” the divers gently, “as if in thanks”; that the divers thought it was “the most beautiful experience they ever had”; and that one diver said he would “never be the same” appeared in the e-mail message, which was sent to The Times’s writer, Charles Siebert, in the course of his reporting. In seeking to confirm the accuracy of the article, Mr. Siebert read several accounts of the episode, including one published by The San Francisco Chronicle in December 2005 on which he based his retelling.
Mr. Siebert said that he unwittingly incorporated some of the phrasing from the e-mail message that he had been sent earlier. The Times does not allow writers to replicate language without attribution, and had the editors known of these repetitions, they would not have published the passage in that form. Link
Gawker notes that the paper’s reaction to Siebert’s transgression is very different from how it handled the Maureen Dowd incident back in May. From the Gawker post:
…it’s not different—at all—from what Maureen Dowd did in May, when she "inadvertently" copied an entire paragraph written by Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall into her column. Dowd’s explanation for the slip was that she was "talking to a friend of mine…who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column…but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me." We have to assume, giving Dowd the benefit of the doubt, that she was referring to an e-mail conversation, because it’s preposterous to imagine that her friend verbally recounted a 43-word paragraph word-for-word and that Dowd took it down in her notes as such. So it was an instance of a Times reporter unintentionally lifting language from an e-mail.
When Siebert does it, he gets a 232-word editor’s-note-lashing explaining, in finite detail, how the error happened. When Dowd does it, she gets this:
Correction: May 18, 2009
Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday, about torture, failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.
